Question on Program-ID in COBOL.

[Radhika Apte]

Hi,

I had the following question in an interview;

I've 4 programs. Their names are different but they have same PROGRAM-ID, in the identification division. Can this cause a problem or what happens because of this?

I said this may fail?

[Robert Sample]

The PROGRAM-ID is used by the linkage editor / binder to name the load module. So having four different programs using the same PROGRAM-ID means that only the last program compiled will be able to use that name.

This assumes that there are no linkage editor / binder statements provided; if they are provided, then what happens depends on what the statements are and the compile order for the four programs.